Love Lana Del Rey’s “Season of the Witch” Cover and Need More? Check This Out…

If you got to check out Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark this past weekend and stayed through the credits, you heard Lana Del Rey’s cover of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch”. As a fan of her material, I really do dig the cover quite a bit. I like the original as well and it has definitely landed on my Halloween playlists in year’s past so I may have to switch up this year and put Lana Del Rey’s cover in the rotation but has much as I adore the cover, the multiple voices that come in during the song’s second verse reminded me of one of the albums I revisit that I don’t hear talked about too often and I’d like to take this opportunity to hopefully introduce some folks to it.

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19 years ago, I was re-introduced to Poe. Sure, I remember her song “Angry Johnny” and “Trigger Happy Jack” from her 1995 album “Hello”. Hell, I think I even bought that album. But how I was re-introduced to her was thanks to 2000’s Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows. Her song “Haunted”, which was off of her album of the same name, closed out the film. At the time, I absolutely hated the film but I have warmed up to it a bit more as years have passed – especially after finding out how much the studio muddled with it. Believe it or not, BW2 was how I got reintroduced to not only Poe but first heard about Queens of the Stone Age and At The Drive-In.

Related: Read Andy’s review of ‘SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK’

What made Poe’s “Haunted” more interesting is that it was a companion piece to Mark Z. Danielewski’s, Poe’s brother, monstrous tome House of Leaves. I first heard of Danielewski’s novel from other horror fans on message boards where some touted it was pretty scary and tense. I picked up the book and maybe got halfway through it before I lost interest. That is not reflective on the book, it is more reflective on me not really reading very much and the structure of the book being a bit more advanced. House of Leaves is a story within a story within another story along with footnotes, letters to decode and some pages containing oddly formatted sentences or words. I’d like to pick it back up again but I’ll have to buy another copy as I cannot find my original.

Related: Listen to Audio Books of “Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark“

While Del Rey’s song doesn’t mimic any specific song off of “Haunted”, it definitely feels like the same mood of some of the tracks from this album. It could be a personal feeling as I heavily listened to this album in November and December of 2000 and still find myself listening to it when the leaves change color. If you have ever read House of Leaves and never heard this album, give it a listen (you may even notice some of the song titles). The album was released on vinyl for Record Store Day 2019 as a Books-A-Million exclusive (I drove out to the nearest one in Illinois to get a copy). I also hope that someday, Poe will give us another album as this was her last contribution.

In addition to embedding the album from Spotify (which I recommend listening to as an album and not just picking and choosing songs), I’ll give you her video for “Hey Pretty” which features her brother Mark reading a chapter from House of Leaves.